Making work better (sometimes) - NixonMcInnes

Making work better (sometimes) @willmcinnes

This was us about a year ago Now 20 people in Brighton, UK

PS. We are horribly imperfect – what follows is not perfection, but it is an attempt to improve ‘normal’

business.

These two books inspired how our company would behave. If you haven’t, read them. They

are INSPIRING.

SMS

PR

Other agency

Digital Engagemen

t

Brand/advertising

Insight

Nixon McInnes

Internal comms

Business teams

(GBS/ BCE)HR

Legal

Customer service

Client

Our mission at NixonMcInnes is to improve the relationships between large organisations and

the people that matter to them.

We do this by helping these large organisations become social businesses.

Datacopter

We like making things too. This is a realtime visualization of tweets around a

Channel 4 programme called The Promise

The fun stuff

We value results – where you work or when is less important to

us. Some people call this ROWE.

The Wall of Win.Because praise matters and

spontaneous P2P praise matters most.

Someone gave Clive the Shield of Win for being

excellent. Now he has to pass it on.

Our clever technologists built NMStereo – a

crowdsourced stereo hooked up to Twitter

(currently broken :)

At ‘First Fridays’ we feed our brains with talks from amazing speakers on mental health, geodesic art, activism and music, banking, improv etc etc.

Once a year we have the NM Summer Camp – people

bring their partners, kids and pets. Sitting around a fire is

good.

The tough stuff

Weekly KPIs

We operate Open Book Accounting: everyone knows everything about the

finances. Each Monday morning, we see the forecast at the team standup – no secrets.

Everyone knows how much everyone else earns…

Yep...

Business planningBudgeting and business planning are done

democratically (this is just an early stage idea generation session at an away day)

We create small, decentralised sub-teams to deal with specialist

issues – there is a Rewards Team to manage the annual

reviews process, for example (toughest job in the company)

• Fair?• Attractive?• Equitable?• Affordable?

Ross published his Personal Development Plan on the blog. He

did Illustration at uni.

For two years we have measured happiness every day using 3 buckets and a load of tennis

balls.It creates a currency for discussion and

awareness.

• NM church of failOn an away day a group came up with an

idea called ‘Church of Fail’ to celebrate failing. People admit a failure, and the

congregation applaud. It is weird. And cathartic.

No idea if it works.

• NM church of fail

Strange looking congregation. Who is in the window?

Challenges

We are often very stressed. People can feel isolated.

We are all very busy. Some of this nice stuff is hard to hold onto when everything is a

rush.

UK employment law isn’t exactly friendly towards progressive business practices.

People still don’t always tidy up after themselves. Transparency is messy too. The

problems don’t go away – in fact they can loom large.

Results?

We have an amazingly talented team, with very high levels of personal growth and

retention. They rock.

We have been on the WorldBlu list of ‘Most democractic workplaces’ for 3 or 4 years, and I recently wrote a book

about other progressive business practices at places like Gore, HCL, Grameen and more.

2012 was a good year (but not an easy one)Income growth 20.3%

Net margin 10.4%Happiness 82%

Say hello!

@willmcinnesnixonmcinnes.co.uk

Culture Shock available today for pre-order on Amazon